BI for Social Media and Internet Marketing Analysis

Gathering and analyzing social media business intelligence may sound like an impossible task. While every business manager and executive knows they must leverage social media to market to prospects, and keep customers engaged, these same managers and executives find it difficult to measure the success of social media and internet marketing programs. Without these objective metrics, it is difficult to justify the efforts and investments of internet marketing, social media marketing and pay-per-click marketing campaigns.

As with any business program or project, if the business cannot illustrate the need for, and success of, a proposed program, it is unlikely that management will approve that program. The business is not likely to spend time and resources on social media, or other internet marketing programs, based solely on the fact that its competitors use internet marketing to reach their target audience. So, it is critical to find a way to measure the success of an internet marketing campaign, and to determine whether social media marketing, pay-per-click and SEO efforts provide the success your business requires in order to justify these efforts. Moreover, if these programs do not achieve results, the business must correct or change its approach to achieve appropriate ROI.

Social media is a crucial component of market success in today’s interactive culture and economy. With an ever-increasing user base and ever-expanding social media platforms, the focus on marketing, advertising and product and market analysis must include internet marketing, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and social media marketing. Customers and prospects are focused on various personal, consumer, community and business topics and they find, share and express this focus using social media.

In order to understand the success of social media marketing, and the trends and patterns in customer buying behavior, a business can use a business intelligence solution to interpret the activity feeds from various social media networks and analytics engines, and analyze visits, clicks, conversions, likes, shares, tags, timing and, also the underlying demographics and geographies of the participants. This analysis will help the business to understand the popularity of a topic or product, and the demographics and geographies of the potential audience, and to track various activities and campaigns to goal conversions.

Most of this data is structured, and can be analyzed by exporting or integrating social media and analytics engines using BI tools, and performing various analytical operations and visualizations with slice and dice, drill down, drill through, filtering and other analytical operations. The content generated and written by users on various social media platforms is not structured, and to access and analyze this data, a business must apply semantic analytics to derive quantifiable data from these unstructured data and make confident decisions. To achieve a true picture of the business and its customers the enterprise must combine structured and non-structured data to derive overall snapshots, direction, trends and performance of social media and internet marketing campaigns.